Friday, January 25, 2013

Les Miserables: not just a good show, but a really important theme

I saw the film Les
Misérables recently. I liked it. I acknowledge that it was too long, and
that the actors in it were not chosen for their singing voices. I even thought that the opera-style everything-is-sung-even-dialog was ok. I suppose I would
have been less surprised by the latter, and maybe even more intolerant of the
former (the singing) had I been one of the 60 million or so people who had seen
the musical on stage, but I was not. I was familiar with the story, though I am
certain I never read the entire 1500 pages (Cliff’s Notes, maybe? or "Classics Comics"?), and I had
seen previous film versions.

My favorite is the one with Jean-Paul Belmondo, updated to
take place in WW II, from 1995. I have always like Belmondo, but tended to
think of him as the lean hero of his youth; to see him as the big, handsome
older man in his 60s (he was born in 1933) was great. And it seemed more
plausible that he was able to lift the cart off the trapped man than Hugh
Jackman, even though Belmondo was much closer to what Jean Valjean’s actual age
would have been. The reason that updating the Belmondo film to WW II was fine
was the same reason I liked the recent movie: that the social and political
issues it addresses are timeless. Les
Misérables, book, musical or film, is not about the music but about the
oppression of people – mainly poor people – by the rich and powerful and their
minions. It is a profoundly political movie, and to see it and to not
understand that would be, well, something I don’t understand. It is not just
about the nobility and heroism of one man, who was imprisoned for 19 years for
stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew and then becomes reborn
and redeemed (did he have to be redeemed?) by a kindly monsignor, and his future
works, which included sparing the life of his life-long adversary Javert when
he had the chance to kill him. It is not about religion. It is about the
ever-present possibility of the people rising up to free themselves of the yoke
of tyranny as much as the tyrants continue to be able to continue to return to
power. When Anatole France wrote in “The Red Lily” in 1894 that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids
the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and
to steal bread,” he is both thinking of Hugo and commenting on profound
injustice of the social order. Les
Misérables takes place between 1815 and 1832. The French Revolution has
come, and gone, as has Napoleon, but there is still a monarchy, and an
aristocracy, and brutal oppression of the poor and repression of those who rise
against the powerful.

Kind of like today. When banks are too big to fail, when
millions of Americans have lost their jobs and homes and the banks like JP
Morgan Chase, bailed out by our taxes, records a record profit of $21 billion,
and their CEO is proud of it when he should be in prison. When corporations
seek to be judged solely on how much profit they make, rather than whether in
doing so it makes the world a better place. In America, we support capitalism
and for-profit corporations, but we should not be supporting rapacious profit
making, profit making that depends on destroying so many people’s lives.

In
Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback proposes to make up the enormous budget deficit
caused by the tax cuts he pushed through last year by “growing the economy”.
This is dubious and uncertain enough in itself, but this is also his solution to meeting
the health needs of the people he will not expand Medicaid to cover: they will
get jobs. Except that the kind of jobs they get don’t usually come with health
insurance, and Brownback would be the last person to require them to do so. The
goal should not be to grow the economy so that some people can make most of the
money, it should be to grow the economy to be able to make people’s lives
better. In my “Medicine and Social
Justice” blog from November 3, I quoted Greek physician Alex Benos saying ““Health
and health care are not commodities that exist to drive the
economy. They are among the social goals which we have an economy to achieve.”

The catchphrase of
the French Revolution was “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité -- Liberty-Equality-Fraternity.
I recently purchased a roll of stamps, and the familiar flag stamp has had
added to it “Freedom, Equality, Justice (each on every third stamp). The
difference in the third one is instructive. Justice is good, and is important,
and certainly was absent in France both before their revolution of 1789 and in
the years depicted in Les Misérables. Sure, in the US we don’t say “fraternity”
in this context, but there could be a similar word, like “brotherhood”. But it
is not the word, it is the concept. It is the concept of social responsibility,
of caring about others, about a “we are in this together” attitude that does
not characterize American society. If it did, we would not tolerate people
being without access to health care, or civilians carrying assault weapons, or ever
increasing percentages of our national wealth being in the hands of the top
<1%.

In the Hooper film, the final scene is after Valjean’s
death. There has been a lot of church in the movie; in addition to the good
monsignor who tells the police that he has gifted Valjean with the silver he has stolen, creating the transformation of Valjean from an amoral victim to a
hero, later he and his “daughter”, Cozette, are hidden from the police in a
convent. He dies in a church, with Cozette’s dead mother, Fantine, coming for
him in a most mystical way. A lot of church and a lot of religion. And yet,
that final scene does not show Valjean in a heaven of clouds, harps and angels
with wings. The heaven he goes to is the revolution, all the people who have
died in the movie and hundreds more massed on an enormous barricade, many more
than were in the actual battle in the film. They are there, they are militant,
and though they have been beaten are singing about liberty.

The fight will not be easy, the oppressor has many weapons
on his side, you may be killed in the battle, but it is the good fight, the
fight for what is right. This is the true message of Les Misérables.